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This chapter focuses on the cultural dominance of French in 17th-century France. Latin was little used, though some churchmen still wrote in it. However, women played a highly visible role as cultural arbiters, and a number of bluestocking writers and salonnières, such as Madeleine de Scudéry and Mme de Sevigné, continued to learn Latin, though few wrote in it. There were also a few learned, aristocratic nuns. The arguments raised in favor of Latin learning for girls focused mostly on their potential future as educating mothers. However, Anne Dacier became famous as a translator from Greek, and it is also worth observing that the journal Mercure Galant, aimed at a mixed audience, encouraged women to study.

The years 1760 to 1840 are usually associated with the Industrial Revolution. They also encompassed a series of significant musical developments that led from Galant music to the Romantic/Canonic aesthetic. During this period, every kind of musical instrument underwent a fundamental transformation from the Baroque type to the Romantic. String instruments were rebuilt, mainly in order to make them louder and reduce the overtones, giving them a rounder, thicker sound. Woodwinds were redesigned so that each semitone was played with its own dedicated tone hole; this meant adding keys to close those holes when they were not used. The general system of tuning changed fundamentally, as leading tones became high rather than low and a new simplifying universal tuning, equal temperament, became common. This chapter discusses Period instruments and the influence of musical instruments on performing style, violins, and hardware and software for Period instruments.

One of Bach’s librettists observed in 1725: “anything one can see, hear, smell, taste, feel, sense or in any other way experience or imagine has to be described as galant, totally galant, and completely galant.” This controversial word was closely associated with luxury, a product of Germany’s quickly evolving economic prosperity. New wealth inspired developments in aesthetics, philosophy, and science and the cultivation of expensive leisure time activities. Playing the keyboard increased in popularity over the course of Bach’s lifetime. The composer’s contemporaries associated themselves with galant music, especially minuets, bourrées, and gavottes of French origin, in order to establish social positions that had implications well beyond music. The merits of doing so were hotly debated by theorists such as Buttstedt and Mattheson.

Musical form is often discussed by appealing to metaphors that compare formal sections either to types of containers or to segments of journeys. Although both metaphors are usually combined and used interchangeably by most music analysts, since the nineteenth century container metaphors for form have tended to dominate. This contrasts with what was witnessed during the eighteenth century, where journey metaphors for musical form were more prevalent. The introductory chapter broadly compares container metaphors and journal metaphors for form, especially as they apply to sonata-form expositions in works composed during the Galant era. This chapter also introduces some of the features that tend to distinguish eighteenth-century formal discussions from modern ones, and it concludes with a preview of some of the strategies to be explored in subsequent chapters.

This chapter concludes Musical Motives with an assessment of the benefits and disadvantages of motivic analysis. Listed among the benefits are the method’s general accessibility and its applicability to a wide range of musics. A disadvantage is that a great many pieces even within the Western Classical tradition, naturally resist motivic analysis. The chapter cautions that motivic analysis holds potential but is no panacea. What it does do is allow analysts to quickly and productively engage many dimensions of a musical work. Subsequent portions of the conclusion investigate the extent to which other musico-theoretic entities—specifically, fugue subjects, Galant schemas, and the hooks of popular music—intersect the motive concept. Last, consideration is given to the method’s reliance on literal association as a price to be paid for theoretic rigor.